STS Shuttle discussion thread

[sevenperforce]

 

17 minutes ago, tater said:

Everything @Nibb31 said was spot-on. Shuttle was a great accomplishment, and the idea of it as an x-vehicle, with substantially improved follow on vehicles would have been a far, far better use of resources. In that counterfactual history, we'd still be flying an ancestor of it now I'm sure.

Descendant, I believe... /pedant

Edited January 15, 2018 by sevenperforce

[tater]

Ooops. Drinking decaf this morning (ran out of regular).

[PB666]

2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

If we actually needed the large cargo delivery capabilities of the Shuttle, then surely some agency would have paid for the development of an expendable hypergolic-equipped orbital maneuvering bus that could fly on a Delta IV Heavy or other MHLV along with a high-volume cargo. We have the technology; you basically just need a service module with extra fuel tanks, or something like the Dragon 1 without the internal cargo space or the re-entry shell.

And five years after you would have the same thing on a shuttle already in space.  Siiting there watching the DIV launch the other day I could not help but note the QC in their prelaunch setup.

 

Quote

The fact that NO money has gone toward development of something like this is a pretty good indication that the Shuttle's "payload delivery" capabilities were not really that necessary.

This is mostly oxymoronic. IF we needed, the problem is since the shuttle what we have are not trustable entities and particularly reserved for the highest dollar players. In fact the whole discussion here is rather oxymoronic in the abstract. The point is functionality, either you are improving or you are not you cant call the shuttle an improvement vampire. That improvement can come in two ways  you are either increasing performance or lowering cost. The problem is the STS spawns do neither. . . .so who the hell is going to buy into these systems . . . . and so we have a bunch of companies now saying . . . I can do that (true) . . .and do more of that (maybe) . . . . and I/we will have more customers (likely).

If you tell me . . . . .I can get 60 kT into LEO  bbbbuuuuttttttt   its going to cost you 2 billion dollars only US pork can pay for that and thats it, that is a closed market.
If you tell me . . . .  I can get 60 kT into LEO but its going to cost you 300 million, then that market expands, but then your competitor comes back and says
 . . . .  .. . . . . . . . . . .I can get 60 kT into LEO for the same price that ^he^ can do for 22 kT . . . .
And then you have a market and people can start doing things.

The second oxymoronic statements surround the faux debate. First that the shuttle was old and it was great back then, but became  a space Vampire sucking the blood out of everything, and the reason we are so far behind now because while the shuttle was building the ISS it was sucking the blood out of space (other than it extended the life of hubble by 15-20 years the most productive scientific experiment in the history of science, but that has very little value to the wanted ignorant). Space doesn't have blood and shuttle has no control of ESA and RSA or Japanese space agency. Their economies together are double the size of US, so why aren't they offering cheap or modernesque alternatives. OK so SpaceX comes in and revolutionizes the economy, but SpaceX success was also not crushed by shuttle, SX has been in development for many years and had many problems to overcome while the shuttle was still flying and after it stopped flying. SpaceX proves the point, these agencies have rampant inefficiencies in their procurement.

Independent of the Shuttle, SX was showing the dis-economies in both Shuttle industries and post-shuttle industries. The fact that these persisted despite the fact the shuttle was gone is notable. So part of it was not that shuttles were inefficient, but that NASA and US Govt does a poor job managing contractors and cost overruns. This has always been true in the defense industry, and Harry Truman probably would have never been president had he not repeatedly pointed this out. So that part in and of itself is a Space vampire. Likewise this is going on in Europe and I'm sure Japan. RSA simply lacks resources but we can see corruption there in the innovation. One can look at it a different way, given the rapidly falling budget and the inefficient procurement system we were damn lucky to get 132 shuttle missions to space and back again.

The third sort of oxymoronic comes out of the second and the fact the budget from NASA/gdp had been almost half of that 15 years previous, the budget was falling, and this was the biggest black eye because they are looking at the contractors and wondering why NASA couldn't negotiate contracts better when it was the US Gov't that built the inefficient military procurement system. OK so the big red-tanked  vampire was sucking the blood out of NASA R&D budget. While there is a grain of truth, if the administration was asking the proper question it would be 'while understanding the need for a shuttle to complete ISS, how are we going to revolutionize and improve PL and naut to Orbit functionality while retaining the best part. There is nothing about Shuttle being a Space Vampire that would have stopped any administration from insisting on progress reports toward this (at the time of the addition of the unity module) that NASA extend itself into the study of functional replacements. In sports this is called an unforced error. That's what is is, the guidance of NASA did not do its job. . . . that's why we don't have a crew carrier, that's why we can't fix the Hubble. . . .no evil shuttle Vampires needed to explain this. 

We keep acting here like the structure of the Shuttle and its function are tied at the hip, they are not, shuttle should have evolved and could have been significantly replaced, the fact that it wasn't done appropriately was an error, plain and simple. While the shuttle was overpriced, IMHO, it was better to have it than replacements lacking in performance.

 

Edited January 15, 2018 by PB666

[CatastrophicFailure]

4 hours ago, PB666 said:

This is an artificial argument, why the first two minutes. And what exactly does the Soyuz do that SpaceX will not be able to do cheaper, the capabilities are not moderness, they are basically primative.

Because as long as the SRB’s are burning, all they can do if something fails is hold on & pray. Y’know, like Challenger...

I wasn’t comparing Soyuz & SpaceX, I was comparing abort modes for Soyuz and the shuttle. A Soyuz-style abort tower with capsule on top of the stack would have saved the Challenger crew. Like SLS. Which could conceivably fail in exactly the same way as Challenger. 

[PB666]

35 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Because as long as the SRB’s are burning, all they can do if something fails is hold on & pray. Y’know, like Challenger...

Quote

which rapidly disintegrated due to overwhelming aerodynamic forces.-wikiepdia

 I would not use SRBs above max Q, it seems like a waste.

Quote

I was comparing abort modes for Soyuz and the shuttle. A Soyuz-style abort tower with capsule on top of the stack would have saved the Challenger crew.

Wishful thinking, think 90,000 feet and explosive decompression and followed by at least complete loss of consciousness in 15 seconds. The logic here is that if the orbiter had survived structurally  . . . . .x, y, z could have happened. Orbiter did not survive.

Quote

The launch had been approved despite a predicted ambient temperature of −3 °C (27 °F), well below the qualification limit of major components such as the SRBs, which had been certified for use only at temperatures above 4 °C (39 °F).^[5] Evidence found in the remnants of the crew cabin showed that several of the emergency air supplies (PEAPs) carried by the astronauts had been manually activated, suggesting that forces experienced inside the cabin during breakup of the orbiter were not inherently fatal, and that at least three crew members were alive and capable of conscious action for a period following vehicle breakup.^[ - wikipedia

Enough said. Using a system intentionally outside its rating is a primary error of negligence. Revisionist history is such an entertaining sport.

The boosters, as I mentioned in the other post would not survive my redesign, and certainly I would not let DoD officials tinker in my launch safety timing, that was stupid.

[sevenperforce]

48 minutes ago, PB666 said:

 

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Because as long as the SRB’s are burning, all they can do if something fails is hold on & pray. Y’know, like Challenger...

I wasn’t comparing Soyuz & SpaceX, I was comparing abort modes for Soyuz and the shuttle. A Soyuz-style abort tower with capsule on top of the stack would have saved the Challenger crew. Like SLS. Which could conceivably fail in exactly the same way as Challenger. 

Wishful thinking, think 90,000 feet and explosive decompression and followed by at least complete loss of consciousness in 15 seconds. The logic here is that if the orbiter had survived structurally  . . . . .x, y, z could have happened. Orbiter did not survive.

Explosive decompression? On SRB burn-through and start of vehicle breakup, Soyuz-style abort tower motor is triggered. Capsule is pulled free, maintains passive aerodynamic stability up to skirt jettison, enters under harsh but not dangerous ballistic trajectory, chutes deploy. What more do you need?

[Starman4308]

1 hour ago, PB666 said:

Wishful thinking, think 90,000 feet and explosive decompression and followed by at least complete loss of consciousness in 15 seconds. The logic here is that if the orbiter had survived structurally  . . . . .x, y, z could have happened. Orbiter did not survive.

You are misrepresenting his point here. He's not claiming the astronauts could have survived the Challenger disaster with the Space Shuttle as it was.

The logic is that if the Orbiter had been replaced by a conventional capsule-with-LAS design, that capsule would have stood a great chance of getting out intact. The Orbiter was doomed by its design, which put the crewed vehicle on the side of its propellant and two SRBs, and had no abort mode for failing SRBs. Had the ground crew or Shuttle crew decided "okay, we need to abort now"... they could not have aborted until the SRBs burned out, because the earliest abort past a pad abort was an RTLS after SRB burnout.

A conventional stack, on the other hand, the LAS could have been fired off, separating the crew from the failing SRB. The exact same SRB with the exact same circumstances and exact same launch pressures would not have doomed Challenger's crew if there was a functional abort mode.

That's the advantage of the conventional pod-with-LAS: no matter what happens to the extremely complicated launch vehicle, the crew is still alright if a much smaller and simpler abort system functions. The Shuttle didn't have that, and that killed several astronauts.

While a LAS would not have saved Columbia's crew (as the foamstrike damage was not discovered during launch), it too was the fault of putting the crewed vehicle on the side of the propellant tank. Debris from the launch vehicle itself caused critical damage to the Orbiter, something that would have been physically impossible if the crew vehicle was on top of the launch vehicle.

[sevenperforce]

21 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

The logic is that if the Orbiter had been replaced by a conventional capsule-with-LAS design, that capsule would have stood a great chance of getting out intact. The Orbiter was doomed by its design, which put the crewed vehicle on the side of its propellant and two SRBs, and had no abort mode for failing SRBs. Had the ground crew or Shuttle crew decided "okay, we need to abort now"... they could not have aborted until the SRBs burned out, because the earliest abort past a pad abort was an RTLS after SRB burnout.

That's the advantage of the conventional pod-with-LAS: no matter what happens to the extremely complicated launch vehicle, the crew is still alright if a much smaller and simpler abort system functions. The Shuttle didn't have that, and that killed several astronauts.

While a LAS would not have saved Columbia's crew (as the foamstrike damage was not discovered during launch), it too was the fault of putting the crewed vehicle on the side of the propellant tank. Debris from the launch vehicle itself caused critical damage to the Orbiter, something that would have been physically impossible if the crew vehicle was on top of the launch vehicle.

Yeah, it's hard to beat the inherent safety factor of a capsule-on-top design. That being said, the attractiveness of parallel staging, both from a thrust+dV perspective and from a structural perspective, is obvious. The structural aspect is particularly apparent when you're talking about a large reusable cargo bay; you have to have a HUGE first stage (e.g., BFR) to get a cargo bay up on top of a serially-staged LV.

There is really no good way to combine crew safety and parallel staging. 

[CatastrophicFailure]

Other guys beat me to my own point. 

Yes, if SLS were to suffer the exact same failure as Challenger, the crew would likely survive. Even if the abort motor didn’t fire (and in the case of Challenger they knew for a while there was a problem, the plume from the booster was visible for nearly 20 seconds), the capsule would most likely survive much as the Dragon capsule survived the initial breakup of that CRS flight. 

Putting a crew on the side of the rocket where they cannot abort (and their heat shield is completely unprotected) was the critical safety design flaw of the shuttle. 

[tater]

This site has an interesting history of early space shuttle proposals:

http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld001.htm

 

[sevenperforce]

Also, because I apparently can't keep myself from derailing threads....

Spoiler

SLS has three stages: Boosters, Core, Upper Stage. The following numbers are for Block IB and LEO throw, assuming that with hydrolox upper stages the BLEO performance will be comparable:

Payload: 100 tonnes

• EUS: 440 kN thrust, 465s, 130 tonnes propellant, est. dry mass 16.5 tonnes.
  • dV: 3.4 km/s
  • TWR: 0.2
• Core: 9116 kN thrust, 366s, 894 tonnes propellant, dry mass 85.3 tonnes.
  • dV (central stack): 5.97 km/s
  • TWR (central stack): 0.76
• Boosters (each): 16,000 kN thrust, 242s, 625 tonnes propellant, est. dry mass 114 tonnes.
  • dV (whole stack): 1.47 km/s
  • TWR (whole stack): 1.2

So let's say we want to match this with a vacuum-expanded BE-3 on the upper stage, a cluster of Raptors on the core, and clustered Merlins on the boosters, with optional LOX crossfeed from the boosters to the raptors. That's just about the ideal liquid-fueled LV, from a thrust-and-isp standpoint, even though obviously we would never see SpaceX and BO engines on the same vehicle (or any SpaceX engines on a non-SpaceX vehicle).

Any estimates of the isp or mass of a vacuum-expanded BE-3?

If not, we can just skip this and go straight to the Raptor core and Merlin boosters.

[tater]

Actually, as a non "commercial XXX" vehicle, any true NASA vehicle would indeed be exactly such a hybrid of company A core, company B, US, etc. That's how NASA rolls.

[HebaruSan]

I like that the Shuttle did something different and ambitious and made it work*. Vertically oriented pods are overall the better choice, but if that was all anyone had ever launched to orbit, the world would be a more boring place. I learned a lot from building asymmetric thrust vehicles in KSP, and I have the Shuttle to thank for that.

Wasn't there some NASA messaging at the time about the Shuttle making spaceflight routine? I think that affected how it is seen. Mercury and Apollo were over and everybody wanted/expected the risks to end as well, because time and technology. Apollo killed a crew on the pad, and nearly suffocated another in space due to multiple flaws with a complex chain of causes not unlike the O-ring disaster. But the successes outshine those failures. I think the Shuttle also deserves some of that forgiveness.

I also find the Shuttle had the coolest looking launches. But I couldn't ask the taxpayer to keep flying it just to entertain me (or for any of the other above reasons).

 

* Yes, I know, two crews lost...

• Challenger was more of an indictment of the program's management than the vehicle; they were told it was too cold to launch safely and they went ahead anyway because they thought they could squeak by while God was looking the other way. Any rocket could fail if it was subjected to that kind of "go-fever" decision making. ("Yes, I know there was a problem with yesterday's static fire test, but this Commercial Crew is due at the ISS tomorrow and we only have the pad reserved for this week. Let's just go for it.")
• Columbia is a legit indictment of both in my book. You knew there was stuff falling off the tank and you knew the crew module was in the way of that stuff. Orbital repair capability? "Physician, heal thyself."

[sevenperforce]

Was looking at the old Shuttle-C designs. Hard to imagine that NASA was so sold on maintaining the ET+SRB design that they'd consider a vehicle which pushed three useless SSMEs into orbit using OMS engines with NO recovery plan. Like, at that point, just design the whole aft end to break off before kicking on the OMS system!

I believe the only way to combine parallel staging with actual crew safety would be to do something like a scaled-down BFS, crossfed from a pair of parallel boosters, with a capsule-shaped crew cabin+OMS that could re-enter independently. OMS acts as LES in an abort scenario.

Crossfeed is necessary because that's the only way to get volume in the core for a cargo bay.

[PB666]

1 hour ago, Starman4308 said:

The logic is that if the Orbiter had been replaced by a conventional capsule-with-LAS design, that capsule would have stood a great chance of getting out intact. The Orbiter was doomed by its design, which put the crewed vehicle on the side of its propellant and two SRBs, and had no abort mode for failing SRBs. Had the ground crew or Shuttle crew decided "okay, we need to abort now"... they could not have aborted until the SRBs burned out, because the earliest abort past a pad abort was an RTLS after SRB burnout.

You proport a solution, and you are pushing thats what I understand.

If that booster were the same distance from the failing of the seal to the bottom of the Soyuz capsule everyone on the soyuz capsule would have died also and no-one would of escaped.

There are two risk management logics here>
1. That the defense department should not have been trying to stick a launch time on a civilian space craft (the person who made this decision should have been prosecuted).
2. That the failing of the SRBs, its potential weaknesses,the fact that its ISP was low and really was not economically recyclable should have seen an opting for a more safe and effective booster.

I know, for fact, for instance if there is a complete engine failure (such as an ash cloud passing or a flock of ducks) shortly after a 747 takes off, it will unlikely land safely, thats a risk you take when you fly.
The same was more so true for a Concorde.

My suggestion here is if you want to do risky stuff in risky space, you have to crawl out of your momma's bossom a bit.
 

1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

Other guys beat me to my own point. 

Yes, if SLS were to suffer the exact same failure as Challenger, the crew would likely survive. Even if the abort motor didn’t fire (and in the case of Challenger they knew for a while there was a problem, the plume from the booster was visible for nearly 20 seconds), the capsule would most likely survive much as the Dragon capsule survived the initial breakup of that CRS flight. 

Putting a crew on the side of the rocket where they cannot abort (and their heat shield is completely unprotected) was the critical safety design flaw of the shuttle. 

If the SLS would ever get a crew in space (next 5 years) we can discuss that. IF wishes were horses beggars would ride.

[tater]

Some of the early shuttle concepts in that link I posted used drop tanks, and all the rocket engines were on the reusable shuttle. A couple look a lot like 2 shuttle external tanks with the shuttle in the center. 

I’m still in he camp of mostly keeping crew and cargo separate. Cost savings can be had the F9 way (recovering parts of the LV), or simply by lofting large payloads in fewer launches that are less expensive. Shuttle flights were so incredibly expensive. Once D2 or cst-100 are flying, what could you launch for the 1.whatever billion price tag of just a single shuttle launch?

Crew and assembly? Launch either crew capsule, AND a hub/airlock module with a robotic arm (another launch). You still have 10 launches to play with to equal shuttle in cost.

 

 

Edited January 15, 2018 by tater

[CatastrophicFailure]

56 minutes ago, PB666 said:

f that booster were the same distance from the failing of the seal to the bottom of the Soyuz capsule everyone on the soyuz capsule would have died also and no-one would of escaped

 Not sure what you’re trying to say here? The crew module of the shuttle wasn’t anywhere near the failed seal, either. The jet from the seal cut through an SRB strut, the SRB shifted and hit the ET, and the whole mess crumbled. It didn’t explode, it broke up, mostly from aerodynamic, forces. We know the crew compartment of the shuttle did survive the breakup. A space capsule likely would too, as they’re built incredibly strong (see: Dragon in failed CRS launch again).

But Anyway, my friend, you seem to be missing the point that they knew Challenger was failing for a good long time, more than enough to activate an abort system had one been present, but the inherent design prevented this.

 

57 minutes ago, PB666 said:

f the SLS would ever get a crew in space (next 5 years) we can discuss that. IF wishes were horses beggars would ride

Um... whether SLS will ever fly isn’t the point, the point is, that if it did suffer the same failure as Challenger, the crew would most likely abort and survive...

[Starman4308]

2 hours ago, PB666 said:

I know, for fact, for instance if there is a complete engine failure (such as an ash cloud passing or a flock of ducks) shortly after a 747 takes off, it will unlikely land safely, thats a risk you take when you fly.
The same was more so true for a Concorde.

My suggestion here is if you want to do risky stuff in risky space, you have to crawl out of your momma's bossom a bit.

Yes, something that clearly happens all the time, because we know air travel is the most dangerous form of transportation out there.

Oh, no wait, it's the safest per passenger-mile.

Your disingenuous insult is also very easy to say when you're not the one climbing into a vehicle with a 2/135 failure rate, when you're not the one authorizing those launches, when you're not even the guy inspecting the heatshield for defects.

We know space travel is risky, but that's no excuse for asking astronauts to fly in inherently flawed vehicles, nor is it an excuse for asking the American public to pay for disproportionately expensive orbital launch vehicles. You seem obsessed with the fact that there's been a gap in US orbital capabilities imposed by cancellation of the Space Shuttle program, and ignore, twist, or misrepresent all other factors towards that singular fact.

The gap itself was caused when the federal government approved an inherently flawed and overly ambitious space transport plan, and it lasted so long because the federal government couldn't make up its mind on how to replace it, with the Ares program followed by SLS, with a few bucks thrown towards actually reasonable proposals to restore LEO manned capability.

Had there been actual determination to restore manned spaceflight capacity, there would have been essentially no gap. The underfunded commercial crew delivery program will almost certainly be sending up astronauts either late this year or early 2019, and was started in 2010. 9 years from the Columbia disaster gets you to 2010, a year before the Space Shuttle was retired.

 

"My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch - April?"

Yes, I want you to launch in April, if that's what it takes for the mission to succeed.

 

EDIT: On a much lighter note, the sheer absurdity of the Armageddon scene made me do the math: even with a cargo bay filled with extra OMS fuel, I'm pretty sure they couldn't have managed more than 1400 m/sec of delta-V out of the OMS, which would be nowhere near enough to hit Earth escape velocity, nevermind turn back around and manage a 0-velocity rendezvous with an asteroid. This, I'm sure, is the only glaring inaccuracy in the entire movie.

Edited January 15, 2018 by Starman4308

[GoSlash27]

3 hours ago, PB666 said:

If that booster were the same distance from the failing of the seal to the bottom of the Soyuz capsule everyone on the soyuz capsule would have died also and no-one would of escaped.

How would that happen? There's no way for a top mounted capsule to be anywhere near a failing SRB seal. *Especially* not a Soyuz.

Best,
-Slashy

Edited January 16, 2018 by GoSlash27

[CatastrophicFailure]

1 hour ago, Starman4308 said:

EDIT: On a much lighter note, the sheer absurdity of the Armageddon scene made me do the math: even with a cargo bay filled with extra OMS fuel, I'm pretty sure they couldn't have managed more than 1400 m/sec of delta-V out of the OMS, which would be nowhere near enough to hit Earth escape velocity, nevermind turn back around and manage a 0-velocity rendezvous with an asteroid. This, I'm sure, is the only glaring inaccuracy in the entire movie.

Thanks, I always wondered this. 

What about with big silly boosters strapped to the sides?

[PB666]

34 minutes ago, Starman4308 said:

Yes, something that clearly happens all the time, because we know air travel is the most dangerous form of transportation out there.

Oh, no wait, it's the safest per passenger-mile.

Your disingenuous insult is also very easy to say when you're not the one climbing into a vehicle with a 2/135 failure rate, when you're not the one authorizing those launches, when you're not even the guy inspecting the heatshield for defects.

 

Go back to the 1920s and 1930s. I will address all of your comments in a second but I will address this specifically. The reason Air-travel is the safest per mile is a whole lot of things have to be correct before it takes off. You don't think of it now, but in the mid-1970s no one thought about vertical windsheer, in the mid to late 70s there were a few incidences where planes taking off and then engine loses power and it drops from the sky, nothing really wrong with the craft but people on the ground reported something about the air. Its was researched and found the aircraft was experiencing windsheer because the airport was close to a cell at the time the plane takes off. So they add windsheer detectors at the airport. There are other things, a plane flying across South America disappears, another pilot says geeze its interesting that I was 60 miles off course, and so high altitude winds become part of the weather estimates. This type of thing.

But the shuttle or any spacecraft is no different, Apollo 13 was hit by cloud lightning, the shuttles seal failed because of excessive cold. And so by flying we learned more parameters that constitute good flight. And these things are context specific, bad weather for a blimp is not the same as bad weather for a Concorde or the same as bad weather for the shuttle. That is not disingenuine, its just the way humans learn.
Many of the major pioneers of flight died while flying, dare to use the word hero, but of course if you are flying today your safety comes from lessons they taught us in their activities. This is what is, this is what happened. Of the 144  flights of the shuttle their was one upper atmospheric failure, so it was not common, the flaw was researched and it was found to be a judgement error, not specifically a vehicle malfunction. There is no rationalization of judgement errors, depending on how severe the error any system can be compromised . . . . from confusion about the trustability of pitot-tubes on AF447 to the downing of the commercial plane to the disappearance of MH370. The STS-51-L vehicle did perform as rated or more correctly it failed when performing outside of its predetermined rating. This is physics plain and simple. So engineer looked at the thermal expansion of a rubber ring in manifold and determined that if the temperature fell below X, its position may not be fixed and it may move, and during the flight this happened and there was a highly predictable accident. It was not clear that the orbiter would suffer catastrophic damage but it did and people died, it was not the orbiters fault, the boosters fault per-say or the engineers fault since its limitation was known. But in these accidents we still learn things that result in improvements, we ask questions about safety margins, etc. . . . . we learn.

I am not questioning the concept you present I am wholy questioning your focus.
The point is that the shuttle launched, other than the ISS living portions about a dozen science missions, including one it left in space and then retrieved to study the damage of space on a number of materials (the so called materials science test in KSP).  OK, so we have to conceptualize what we are doing in a valid context, borrowing from above we ask the question what was the Wright brothers doing, it was certainly dangerous, but what was it. They are testing the engineering model as free standing aerodynamic system. The system is very crude, but we know very little about the dynamic, so that is OK, it is because they began the first serious model then today we have very safe models and we know magnitudes more about aerodynamics than they did. But that is what had to happen  for us to have flight safety. Hubble was a model space telescope, it was found to  be incorrect, the shuttle allowed us to test a repair, it worked, and more modifications were made and now Hubble is a historical science platform.

This is the focus, so you know how to better use space you have to learn about space just like the writght borthers learned about aerodynamics

11. Rescue of the Solar Max Solar observation satellite.
13. Earth radiation budget satellite.
15. First retrieving and recycling of a satellite (2) Palapa B2 and Westar VI
16. First repair of  a commercial satellite in space.
17. Microgravity experiments
22. Spacelab
29 Magellan Venus probe.  ( September 19th 1990 - September 14, 1994)
31 Galileo Jupiter probe deployment ( 14 years in space and 8 years in the Jovian system )
36 Ulysses intertial upper stage
38 ASTRO-1 observatory
39 Compton Gamma ray observatory <========" the heaviest astrophysical payload ever flown at that time at 17,000 kilograms "
43 Upper atmosphere research satellite
46 ATLAS-1 deployment
51 LAGEOS geodescic radar study.
54 ATLAS-2 deployment 
66- Atlas-3 science platform
74 Japan flyer mission retrieved.
75 Tethered satellite testing
80 Wake shield testing, 
80 Retrievable UV experiment launch
95 Chandra X-ray observatory
97 Shuttle radar topography mission
108 hubble servicing and performance upgrade
126-  last hubble servicing and performance upgrade.
134 - alpha-magetic spectrometer

So the abstract problem I have with you is that you think all risk is equal and so minimize risk no matter the other cost. So why Wright brothers take risk and why be benefit, to learn how for humans to fly. And why shuttle takes risk to learn how to do space in a different way an learn. If you can't understand that some risks are worth taking and some are not we have nothing to talk about. But I would say the Wright brothers would disagree with you, so would Galileo, so would Neil Armstrong, so would most of the astronauts. And that's the point, its their risk to take, not yours.

[GoSlash27]

2 minutes ago, PB666 said:

If you can't understand that some risks are worth taking and some are not we have nothing to talk about.

All due respect, but I believe you are the one who is struggling with this concept. If you have a choice of ways to complete a job and one is inherently safer and more economical, then that's what you go with. You don't just shrug off the unnecessary hazard and cost by shrugging and saying "life is hard, suck it up". I find this argument completely unpersuasive and more than a little callous.

Best,
-Slashy

[Jaff]

Satisfy a question if you would guys, 

 

challenger - if they knew the booster was goosed 20 seconds before it went bang, why not separate them and abort the mission? 

[PB666]

4 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

All due respect, but I believe you are the one who is struggling with this concept. If you have a choice of ways to complete a job and one is inherently safer and more economical, then that's what you go with. You don't just shrug off the unnecessary hazard and cost by shrugging and saying "life is hard, suck it up". I find this argument completely unpersuasive and more than a little callous.

Best,
-Slashy

Sometimes it is and you have to suck it up

[GoSlash27]

1 minute ago, PB666 said:

Sometimes it is and you have to suck it up

Yeah, and sometimes it doesn't have to be and you make it easier when you can. Still not a persuasive argument.